How to make arrow tips

Outlook 2010 – It’s a Love Hate Thing Argh!

I upgraded to Office 2010 earlier this year when I purchased a new PC and have been adjusting ever since. At first, I didn’t see much not to like (other than having to find a few things again). But then, disaster struck – Microsoft removed on of my favorite features and one that made Outlook a serious contender in the contact management software world. Read on to see what I love and what I hate about Outlook 2010 so you can decide if an update is to be embraced or avoided.

What Happened to Arrow-Tips?

Happy New Year! Wow – have I been neglecting this poor blog! And, as those of you who have seen me in the past six months know, it is horribly out of date for what we are doing with Advena Artemis now. So, its time for a redesign and I’m bringing on an intern to help facilitate the process with my wonderful designers at Bread n Beyond . In the mean time, here are some quick updates:

Sale of Gulf Coast Welding

Yay – we sold my former client (owned by none other than my Mom) Gulf Coast Welding Corp. . The deal with the new owners from Viacap was inked earlier this week and we are very excited for everyone involved. Best of luck to the folks at GCW Corp. and Viacap – the future looks bright!

New Focus for Advena Artemis

As many of you know Advena Artemis started as a software company with our Microsoft Outlook add-in product HuntressPro. HuntressPro enhanced Outlook as a contact management and sales management tool so that users could manage sales activities in the same place that they manage most of their other business and personal activies e.g. sending and receiving emails, keeping their calendar, and managing their tasks in, etc. We loved the Huntress solution, but we found that we were adding more value helping our clients create, organize and manage their sales and marketing processes than as a software provider. And as we’ve acknowledged from the beginning, one size CRM does not fit all so we’ve ended up spending as much time helping clients select and implement other software solutions effectively as we have implementing HuntressPro.

Since we were struggling to provide superior support to clients both as a software company and as consultants, we’ve decided

to focus on the area where we are adding the most value – consulting. We’ve very excited about this change in focus and will be announcing some great sales and marketing service offerings soon (thanks to the great people at Design at Work Creative Services for helping us with our brochure)! In the mean time, if you are a Huntress user, please do not feel abandoned – we are still available to help work through the transition and we will still be providing Outlook efficiency and effectiveness coaching as part of our service offering.

Collaboration

Arrow-Tips readers will know that I am a huge advocate of working with great external marketing and PR firms and there are some especially great ones right here in our home town of Houston that we love to collaborate with. One such firm is BrandExtract who we began our first project with last Fall. We’ve enjoyed working with the talented people at BrandExtract and look forward to more projects in the future.

So that’s the news for now. Look for that new service flier soon and I know I still owe you a final post on posting KPIs as well as a couple of interview posts. We’re also about to gear back up on our bi-weekly newsletters so send us an email if you would like to be added to that distribution list. In the mean time, happy hunting!

Arrow-Tip #65 Use Recurring Appointments to Make a Date with Your Kids

Ah, as the old Staples ad goes – it’s the most wonderful time of the year! Back to school time that is (see Staples video ) and that means my kids are back in school and its time for me to ramp my work hours back up. I’ve made a commitment though to take off early on Friday afternoons so that I can pick my boys up from school and take them for ice cream or somewhere else special. And guess what – Outlook is going to help me keep that commitment – read on to find out how… Read More